Born in Hempstead, Long Island, Seabury was a native New Yorker. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1946, and from Columbia University with a Ph.D. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley starting in 1953.^[2] Once a national official of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, after the tumultuous era of student revolt at Berkeley, he became a leading spokesman for the first American neo-conservatives. He was part of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, which fostered intelligence studies in American universities. He served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during the Reagan Administration.^[3] He married Marie-Anne Phelps; they had two sons. His papers are held at the Hoover Institution.^[4] He died in Pinole, California.^[1]

Seabury was a great player of croquet, and edited a book on the game for Abercrombie and Fitch.^[5]

• 1964 Bancroft Prize
• 1961-62 Guggenheim Fellowship

• "The Banality of Liberalism", The New York Review of Books, November 11, 1965
• Michael Curtis, ed. (1986). "Reviewing the United Nations". The Middle East reader. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-0-88738-101-0.
• "Trendier than thou: the many temptations of the Episcopal Church", Harper's Magazine, 1978
• The Wilhelmstrasse, University of California Press, 1954
• Power, Freedom, and Diplomacy, Random House, 1963
• The Balance of Power, Chandler Pub. Co., 1965
• The Rise and Decline of the Cold War, Basic Books, 1967
• Edward Friedland; Paul Seabury; Aaron B. Wildavsky (1975). The Great Detente Disaster: Oil and the Decline of American Foreign Policy. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02707-1.
• Paul Seabury; Walter A. McDougall (1984). The Grenada Papers. Institute for Contemporary Studies. ISBN 978-0-917616-67-9.
• Angelo Codevilla; Paul Seabury (1989). War: Ends and Means. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-09067-9. (2nd edition Brassey's, 2006, ISBN 978-1-57488-610-8)